William Fisher

NEW YORK, May 6 2005 (IPS) — In the early 1920s, with many in the United States worried about losing traditional values to the secular modernism of jazz, the silver-tongued William Jennings Bryan – three-time Democratic candidate for president – led a fundamentalist crusade to banish Charles Darwin’s 1859 theory of evolution from U.S. classrooms.

Bryan’s movement was flush with success when, in 1925, a Tennessee court found John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, guilty of breaking a new law that made it illegal ”to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals.”

The case, publicised throughout the world, came to be known as ‘The Monkey Trial’. Scopes volunteered to be a test-case defendant after the non-governmental American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that it would offer its services to anyone challenging the new Tennessee anti-evolution statute.

Famed attorney Clarence Darrow led the Scopes defense team. A carnival atmosphere permeated the tiny town of Dayton, Tennessee, as the trial proceeded. Many residents subsequently were angered when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Scopes conviction on a technicality, and the teaching of evolution was restored, according to reports at the time.

It appears to be a matter of deja vu all over again in current-day Topeka, Kansas, where the state’s board of education is holding hearings through next Thursday on what school children should be taught about how life on Earth began.

The Kansas Board of Education’s religious conservative bloc, recently elected to a majority of seats on the state-wide panel, called for the hearings which are being held against the backdrop of proposed new science standards that would require Darwin’s theory to be challenged in the classroom.

The changes could be made as soon as June, in time for the new academic year starting in September. If enacted, Kansas would join the state of Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002.

Kansas has been a focal point of efforts to restrict the teaching of evolution in public schools. Proponents of intelligent design theory hold that the physical universe is so elaborate and complicated that its creation required a sophisticated architect, and they are working to impose that theory in science classrooms.

The Kansas hearings began Thursday and are being conducted in courtroom style. Dozens of witnesses were called to testify and were subject to cross-examination.

Attorney John Calvert, managing director of Kansas-based Intelligent Design Network, said his group supports the theory that ”living creatures are too intricately designed to have come about randomly” and will push for a new school curriculum that would ”encourage teachers to discuss various viewpoints and eliminate core evolution claims as required curriculum.”

His opponent at the hearings is Pedro Irigonegaray, attorney for groups that maintain evolution is a valid science. ”I feel like I’m in a time warp here,” he was quoted as saying. ”To debate evolution is similar to debating whether the Earth is round. It is an absurd proposition.”

Irigonegaray predicted that the State Board of Education would face a lawsuit if it revises the state’s science testing standards to incorporate elements of intelligent design theory.

The Topeka-based lawyer cross-examined anti-evolution witnesses Thursday but Calvert might not have the opportunity to reciprocate with the pro-evolution crowd as many prominent U.S. scientific groups have denounced the debate as founded on fallacy and have boycotted the hearings.

One of the key pro-Darwin witness groups, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), declined to send representatives. The organisation said the hearings likely would sow confusion rather than understanding among the public.

In a letter to George Griffith, science consultant to the Kansas State Department of Education, AAAS chief executive Alan Leshner sided with the leaders of the Kansas science community who have described the hearings as an effort by faith-based proponents of intelligent design theory to attack and undermine science.

The format and agenda of the hearing before the board’s education subcommittee ”suggests that the theory of evolution may be debated,” wrote Leshner. ”It implies that scientific conclusions are based on expert opinion rather than on data.”

In an interview, Leshner told IPS that ”these hearings create a false impression that science and religion are in opposition. They are not.

”There is no science base to the so-called theory of intelligent design, and it would not withstand any scientific criteria for even being called a theory. In science, a theory is not a ”belief” – we don’t believe or disbelieve a theory. We accept or reject theories based on scientific tests of them. Intelligent design is not a scientifically testable concept and therefore should not be taught in science classes,” Leshner added.

Dr. Robert Gropp, director of public policy at the American Institute of Biological Sciences, told IPS ”the hearings sponsored by the Kansas Board of Education may be entertaining political theatre that placates the board’s conservative political base, but these staged events lack scientific and educational merit. It is sad that some politicians in Kansas are still wasting valuable resources trying to mandate the inclusion of pseudo science into the state’s science curriculum. It is hard to see how Kansas students will be prepared to compete for jobs in the twenty-first century if their science classes do not teach science.”

Debates over evolution are currently being waged in more than a dozen states, including Texas where one bill would allow for creationism, as the range of anti-evolution theories are known collectively, to be taught alongside evolution.